The founder of hedge fund Archegos Capital Management was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Wednesday for securities and market manipulation fraud in a scheme that prosecutors said cost global investment banks billions of dollars.
Bill Hwang was told the length of the prison term in Manhattan federal court after he told Judge Alvin K Hellerstein that he felt “really terrible for what happened at Archegos”, alluding to the fund’s demise over three years ago.
The judge did not complete the sentencing hearing, though, and said it will resume on Thursday. But he said he had “pronounced” the length of the prison term he is imposing.
Judge Hellerstein estimated that up to nine financial institutions lost more than nine billion dollars (£7.1 billion) in the fraud.
At Hwang’s July trial, prosecutors blamed Hwang and his co-conspirators, saying they artificially inflated the values of nearly a dozen stocks before the investments collapsed in March 2021, wiping out 100 billion dollars (£79 billion) in market value along with the company he created.
Hwang was convicted in July of 10 criminal counts, but he was acquitted of one charge of market manipulation while being convicted of six others.
Prosecutors said Hwang lied to banks to get billions of dollars to grow his New York-based investment firm before its portfolio grew dramatically from 10 billion dollars (£7.9 billion) to 160 billion dollars (£126 billion).
At the start of Hwang’s trial, Assistant US Attorney Alexandra Rothman told jurors that Hwang was already a billionaire when he sought “to be a legend on Wall Street” by engaging in a sophisticated scheme involving trades of stock derivatives to secretly build extraordinarily large positions in just a few companies.
According to an indictment, the investment public did not know Archegos had come to dominate the trading and stock ownership of multiple companies because it used securities that had no public disclosure requirement. For instance, prosecutors said, Hwang and his firm once secretly controlled more than 50% of the shares of ViacomCBS.
The risky manoeuvres, however, made the firm’s portfolio vulnerable to price fluctuations in a handful of stocks.
Margin calls in late March 2021 wiped out more than 100 billion dollars in market value in just days, the indictment said.
